William Edward “Ed” Farley (BD ’53), 85, died December 27, 2014. Raised in Louisville, Ky., Farley was a member of the 100th graduating class at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1953. He pursued graduate studies in philosophy and theology and earned his doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in New York and Columbia University and later completed post-doctoral studies abroad. In his earliest years of graduate work, he began a career in teaching at Centre College, the University of Louisville, as a graduate assistant at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, in the fields of philosophy and religion at DePauw University, and as associate professor and professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He was an emeritus professor of the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, where he taught for 30 years.

Among a lifetime of numerous honors, including the Fielding Lewis Walker Scholarship in Systematic Theology from Louisville Seminary, Farley was invited by Louisville Seminary to give the Caldwell Lectures in 1989, which he entitled, "The Presbyterian Heritage as Modernism: Reaffirming a Forgotten Past in Hard Times." In 1991, Vanderbilt awarded him the annual Earl Sutherland Prize for Achievement in Research. A prize ordinarily given to a faculty member in one of the pure science fields, Farley was the first winner from the School of Divinity. He received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Theology for Divine Empathy as well as several Lilly Endowment grants and a Lilly Fellowship in Religion. Louisville Seminary honored him as a Distinguished Alum in 2004.